In this Club Capital Leadership Podcast episode, host Bradley Hamner opens by framing the core challenge for small business and agency owners: how to grow leadership, develop teams, and scale profitably while delivering products and services. The episode includes brief promotional segments for Club Capital’s accounting and advisory services and Coach P Consulting’s high‑touch coaching for insurance agencies. The heart of the show is Hamner’s deep dive into the “Buyback Principle,” a framework he learned from Dan Martell. He argues that founders should hire not primarily to expand the business but to buy back their own time, allowing them to focus on high‑value activities that drive growth. Hamner explains why a founder’s time is the most finite asset, contrasts low‑value tasks (e.g., $15‑$30/hour work) with high‑value work (the founder’s $150/hour rate), and introduces a 4x return benchmark: hiring at $35‑$37.50/hour should free enough founder time to generate at least four times that cost in revenue. He shares a recent hire—a part‑time client success manager—to illustrate how incremental revenue can be allocated to reclaim time, and stresses the importance of replacing delegated tasks with activities that match the founder’s hourly value. The episode concludes with a call to action for listeners to apply the principle, improve their bottom line, and lead well.
Chapters
So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast.
Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.
Just get what you need and go.
So with that, let's get into today's episode.
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Hey everyone. So There are a lot of concepts and a lot of frameworks that have really helped me, uh, in my businesses and for me personally. But one of the ones that absolutely I can tell you has been— had the greatest impact on me in the way that I approach certain things to be able to build and scale is this one called the Buyback Principle. And it simply is this: you don't hire to grow your business, you hire to buy back your time. And that in turn is what grows the business. Because you see, the most finite asset that your business possesses is your time, the founder's time. And where you allocate that time is the single most important thing that's going to grow and scale your company. Yes, far beyond your team. Attracting A-players incredibly important. Developing A-players, absolutely incredibly important. But there's nothing that is more important than where you allocate your time. You see, I don't think that the ones that are doing more than us are working any harder. They just get more from every step that they take. It's almost like when Warren Buffett takes a step, he's taking a million steps. Or 10 million steps or 100 million steps more than I would because of where he is. And that's how a lot of the business owners that are doing the things that we want to be able to do, that's how they're doing it as well. They're taking these steps that seem like they're running, but they're not. If you think about a business owner that does $400,000 in top line revenue and the amount of hours that they're spending, they're working 50 hours, 60 hours a week. They never can shut it off. They take work with them everywhere that they go. They're never able to shut it off. Yet when you take somebody who does 10 times that, say they've got a $4 million business, the thing that we probably don't think about as much, but we, we subconsciously maybe assume that they're working 10 times harder— they're not. They're just getting more out of that. Well, why is that? It's because they have leverage, but they've been able to use the revenue to buy back your time. And where you don't begin to, you know, build a business that you grow to hate. If you ever had this experience, maybe you're there now, that as your business is growing, there's more problems coming to you, there's more complexity, there's more team member issues, and you almost grow to resent your own business. But there's a better way. And the buyback principle came from one of my personal coaches, and that's Dan Martell. Who helped me to understand, wait a minute, there's a better way to do this, that I actually take the business revenue. And as we grow, I buy back more time. Just— I'm recording this on Tuesday, August 1st. This will drop several weeks from now on the podcast. But we yesterday just onboarded a client success manager. She's working 10 hours a week. And so why did we do that? Well, there were some I wouldn't say problems, but there were some things that we needed to clean up and there were some areas that we needed some additional support, some additional capacity. Well, the business has been growing, and so we used some of that, not all of it, but some of that additional incremental revenue to buy back more of my time. Kind of goes along with the episode that I did around lug nuts and keeping lug nuts tight. As opposed to constantly tightening lug nuts. And it really all points back to this. In fact, the EA, my growth assistant, my creative marketing assistant, etc., all of this, and no matter what the title is, but especially my executive assistant, are all designed to help me to buy back my time. Because if I can buy back my time and I can reinvest that time into the things that actually grow the business, then I get to do more of the things I love to do, the things that give me energy, and the things that ultimately are going to grow the business. It's like I get to— if I carve out an extra 3 hours a week, 4 hours a week, this person who's working, going to work 10 hours a week, I'd rather pay the money for that so then I can focus on the business that it's actually going to get me 10x growth. In the business versus just the 10 hours that I'm paying her in, in, in, in the business. And so the, the principle, the buyback principle that again I learned from the man Dan Martell, one of my coaches, is you don't hire to grow the business. You hire first to buy back your time. So all the hires, how does this help you to buy back your time so then you can reinvest that, you can fill it back? With the things that are actually going to grow the business. This concept, that sentence is so simple, but once you grasp the power of that, you begin to realize that, hey, I make— let's just say I make $300,000 a year. I'm just using that as an example. Your hourly rate is $150 an hour. Well, what is the buyback principle? Buyback rate says, well, If you look at and get a 4x return, you have somebody that you're paying $35, $37.50 an hour, you're going to get a 4x return on your time and your money, presuming that you actually replace the things you were doing at $20, $25, $30 an hour work with the things that are $150 an hour work. See, we've been told many times, hey, if I just get the things off of me that's $15 an hour work, that's true. But the real unlock is what are the things that are the $150 an hour work? And that thought process has to be done because you may shove off all the things that are $15 an hour work, but if you've— and you create some capacity for you, but if you don't replace it with $150 an hour work, you've just added overhead. And so for the, uh, CSM, the client success manager, we just onboarded Uh, yesterday, that's going to, over the next couple weeks, it's going to buy back more of my time. Well, if that doesn't help, if that doesn't allow me to go and invest in, in what my hourly rate is, then ultimately I just added 10 extra hours times what I pay her. Um, I've just added that much more in overhead, and that doesn't accelerate the business. But if I replace that time and I point my energy, my time, my effort, all of those things to the things that are you know, my hourly rate, or same thing in yours, your hourly rate, then those are the things that's actually going to grow the business. Hope this helps you. Hope this served you well. Have a great day. Lead well.
